Power is Everything
During Apollo 13 after the oxygen tank in the service module exploded forcing the crew to use the lunar module as a life boat to get back home, John Aaron – an incredibly gifted NASA engineer who was tasked with getting the Apollo 13 crew back home safely – flatly stated “Power is everything…we’ve… Read More





IoT Standardization and Implementation Challenges
The rapid evolution of the IoT market has caused an explosion in the number and variety of IoT solutions. Additionally, large amounts of funding are being deployed at IoT startups. Consequently, the focus of the industry has been on manufacturing and producing the right types of hardware to enable those solutions. In current model,… Read More
ARM gets wider and more flexible in vectors
ARM has a storied history of announcing major architecture changes at conferences far in advance of product implementations to get their ecosystem moving. At Hot Chips 2016, their sights are set on revamping the ARMv8-A architecture for a new generation of server and high-performance computing parallelism with a preview of … Read More
Did My FPGA Just Fail?
Designing DRAMs at Intel back in the 1970s I first learned about Soft Errors and the curious effect of higher failure rates of DRAM chips in Denver, Colorado with a higher altitude than Aloha, OR. With the rapid growth of FPGA-based designs in 2016, we are still asking the same questions about the reliability of our chips used for safety-critical… Read More
A New Player in the Functional Verification Space
Israel has a strong pedigree in functional verification. Among others, Verisity (an early contributor to class-based testbench design and constrained random testing) started in Israel and RocketTick (hardware-based simulation acceleration), acquired more recently by Cadence, is based in Israel. So when I hear about an … Read More
AMAT reports strong Q and even better guidance
Last quarter we said that AMAT got its mojo back and it appears to have even picked up speed going into the end of a strong year.
The display business which had been less than reliable in years past has come up with back to back home runs. Applied is growing both its top and bottom line at well above the sluggish market rates and is clearly… Read More
Alphabet vs. Radio: Traffic Info Smackdown
Alphabet is showing signs of taking over just about every infotainment function in cars except one: traffic information. When Alphabet, aka Google, arrived on the automotive scene the company and its minions quickly grasped that there was going to be a big opportunity for search, voice, navigation, maps, traffic and contextual… Read More
Five Ways IoT is Changing Trends in Cognitive Business
How is the Internet of Things, or IoT, changing trends in cognitive business? The impact is evident with the alliance between computers and humans. Computers still quickly assimilate and spew out data based on what is seen, heard and read. The difference is that they are now reasoning, understanding, and learning from those processes,… Read More
4 Reasons for Bluetooth 5 Adoption in IoT
IoT devices have to be connected but power consumption is usually a real concern. If you think about wearables, like for example fitness wristbands, the time between charges could make or break the product. Even if Wi-Fi looks attractive to connect an IoT device, the system developers have quickly realize that the power consumption… Read More
What is Inside the iPhone 7?
TSMC is the bellwether for not only the foundry business, since they are the dominant player, but also the semiconductor industry as a whole. You could also argue that TSMC is a sneak peek into the world economy since they build capacity based on their customer’s forecasts and the world now revolves around semiconductors.
The other… Read More
Making Intel Great Again!